Nehalem

Back in March, Intel accused AMD of breaching their x86 chip licensing agreement, and threatened to pull their license to produce processors if the issue wasn't addressed in sixty days. The disagreement stemmed from AMD's spinning out of chip manufacturing as part of the Global Foundries deal; now, with those sixty days past, it turns out that AMD did precisely nothing to sate Intel's demands.

Intel are reportedly preparing to phase-out two of their three Core i7 processors, despite having only launched the CPUs around six months ago. Hardware partners have been notified that the Intel 2.93GHz Core i7-940 and Core i7-965 Extreme will only accept orders for the two chips up until September 4th 2009, with the final batch shipping on May 7th 2010. The move has led some to suggest that Intel launched the three consumer Nehalem processors so as to keep to their much-publicized timetable, and never intended them to be long-term products.

Apple have launched a new version of their Xserve server, based on Intel's Xeon "Nehalem" processors. The new Apple Xserve is available in single or dual-processor setups, using the quad-core Xeon processor (up to 2.93GHz) paired with between 3GB and 24GB of DDR3 RAM.

We've been hearing about it for awhile now, but Intel officially expanded the availability of their Nehalem-based Xeon processors today. Even though it was first introduced in the Mac Pro, the processors are now available in a wider-range of products.

It's not official yet, but it seems Dell will soon be announcing new models in their Precision T-series. And this time around, they'll be running on Intel Nehalem. These are certain to be pretty powerful computers, to say the least.

Intel have announced a press conference in San Francisco on November 17th, where it will officially launch the Core i7 "Nehalem" processor range. Although test chips are already with reviewers - in fact we reviewed one of the first PCs to use the Core i7 920 CPU, the Gateway FX6800-01e, here - until now the actual release date was unknown.

Intel are gearing up to launch their new Core i7 processor, formerly known as 'Nehalem', and so manufacturers are starting to put out compatible motherboards. Register Hardware have had the ASUS P6T Deluxe on the test bench, complete with six DDR3 RAM slots, 16+2-phase power design, three PCI Express 2.0 slots and onboard Crossfire and SLI. However, because the Core i7 isn't actually officially released yet, they can't tell us exact processor performance figures.

Intel clammed up after announcing the Core i7 processors back in August, saying nothing but that it was aiming for Q4 production. Now leaked information is suggesting a November 2008 launch, together with further details of the mainstream, performance and extreme versions Intel are planning. Each will have four cores and a TDP of 130W.

As images go I realise this isn't the most inspiring, but if you could scrape off the grey gunk - and you're at all interested in the state of play in the silicon market - you'd get a pleasant surprise. AnandTech have managed, somehow, to get their hands on two of Intel's Nehalem processors, the next-gen CPU not expected to hit the market until late in 2008. Based on the 45nm manufacturing process already seen in the Penryn chips, part of Nehalem's appeal is the potential for up to eight cores and up to sixteen simultaneous threads. While the test rig AnandTech were using didn't exactly turn out to be the most reliable, it was enough to run some benchmarks on the 2.66GHz Nehalem chip.